The Astronaut's Wife
by Rand Ravich
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Charlize Theron, Clea DuVall, Donna Murphy, Joe Morton, Johnny DeppDirector: Rand Ravich
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.85:1
Running Time: 110 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-02-08
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: New Line Home Video
Movie Reviews of The Astronaut's Wife
Movie Review: "The Astronaut's Wife"
Summary: 4 Stars
That this film is a psychological thriller, I whole-heartedly agree. I think my problem with another reviewer is that what-else-should it be? I liked, "2001." I liked Tarkovsky's, "Solaris." And, I liked Soderbergh's and Clooney's, "Solaris," remake. I liked Andrew Niccol's, "Gattaca."
The thing with TAW is that, perhaps, because it leaves out outer-space footage and extra-terrestrial monsters, that don't look like Johnny Depp, we can't view it as some sort of action adventure yarn, but must view it with a sense of the unknown rather than a pretended known. I think, also, that this film's portrayal of the largely unknown as a thoroughly uninterested and uninteresting Johnny Depp character was its primary flaw. Depp could have been playing an uninterested and uninteresting CEO of a major corporation or a marine private, only willing to divulge his name, rank and serial number (when and if captured) for all I could tell. Perhaps, if our astronauts were in their sixties or seventies, Paul Newman could have done better. But, because Johnny has proven himself adept at pleasing audiences with wildl-l-l-ly eccentric behavior and quirks of interests in pursuits not known to have been dictated by any senior officer or presumed military code of conduct, it seems unlikely that Johnny acted outside his director's direction to play the extra-terrestrial as somberly and as uncreatively as a fence post, rather than as a tree.
Still, it is an interesting film. And, I suppose, it is vaguely possible that extra-terrestrial adventurers are primarily interested in how stocks are trading on their home-world. Or, maybe, the adventurers are simply Pentium 643s instead of Pentium 4s. Kind of makes me wonder how many versions of Windows they would have needed to think up.
Summary of The Astronaut's Wife
An intriguingly creepy premise but failed execution marks this stylish and ultimately bland thriller about a pretty, young woman whose pretty, young astronaut husband comes back from his most recent space mission a little... odd. Before that fated space trip, Spencer (Johnny Depp) and Jillian (Charlize Theron) were a sunny, happy couple with matching blonde hairdos and a predilection for romping in the sack from extremely clever camera angles. However, after a communications blackout brings Spencer and his partner back down to earth prematurely, things are a little... peculiar. Spencer's partner goes bonkers and has a heart attack; on top of that, the partner's wife takes a fatal shower with a plugged-in radio. Getting out of the space biz, Spencer accepts a job as a corporate exec in New York, and as a welcome to the Big Apple for his comely wife, he molests her at the company cocktail party. Soon enough, Jillian is pregnant, but as you might expect, this pregnancy (twins, don't you know) is a little... unusual. Writer-director Rand Ravich takes his sweet time getting from extremely obvious plot point A to even more obvious plot point B, stretching out the development particulars in mind-numbing, suspense-killing fashion. Even Joe Morton, as a sinisterly psychotic NASA official, can't liven things up--you know you're in bad thriller territory when the biggest scare comes from a light suddenly being switched off. Theron, sporting a Mia Farrow-Rosemary's Baby haircut, sleepwalks beautifully through the movie, but she did this role much, much better in The Devil's Advocate. Depp, with a cornpone Southern accent, is about as realistic as his peroxided hair. Ravich does the viewer no favors with a hackneyed ending straight out of a B-grade paperback horror novel in which the most shocking moment is Theron's sudden emergence as a brunette. With Blair Brown as a jaded socialite who offers to help out Theron by providing do-it-yourself abortion pills, and a lovely Donna Murphy as the suicidal wife who figures it all out before everyone else. --Mark EnglehartA woman becomes embroiled in a mystery after her astronaut husband suffers an accident and retires as a hero from the space program. When he begins acting strangely, she must decide whether his odd behavior is all in her mind, or if he is no longer the man she once knew.
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